1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a distributed processing system and distributed processing method which cause a plurality of devices to distributedly process data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Systems such as grid computing systems are known to improve the processing efficiency by distributed data processing. There is also proposed a technique of using such a distributed processing system to ensure the data security. A technique disclosed in, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-118239 manages image data while retaining a high level of security by fragmenting image data to minimum units (bytes or words) and distributedly storing the image data in a plurality of digital copying machines connected through a network.
However, since the conventional distributed storage technique fragments image data into very small units such as bytes or words, image data reconstitution is time-consuming.
Additionally, even if the processing speed can be increased by causing a plurality of devices to execute large-scale image processing or arithmetic processing as distributed processing, it is impossible in terms of security to easily use a device unrecognized by the distributed processing requester.